Textbooks. Source: "just the ones i'm getting rid of" by Plutor on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.
AOL Money & Finance reports that Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publishing company that publishes college textbooks under a semi-free license, will reach over 40,000 students at over 400 universities in the fall.
The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.
“We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and to 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”
While I would prefer a fully free license instead of a semi-free one (the books appear to be licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), this is still an improvement from the “traditional” model of overpriced physical textbooks that somehow manage to outdate themselves after only one year and digital versions or supplements that lock you in to a specific format or viewer and deny you the right of first sale.